In the first two weeks of November, Microsoft has already dealt with two …

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Windows 7 arrived less than a month ago, and while so far its reception has been quite good, critics have unsurprisingly managed to spread some serious FUD over Microsoft's latest operating system. So far, there have already been two major examples, and they were both quickly picked up by the blogosphere and thoroughly hyped up and discussed. We find it interesting that Redmond isn't ignoring the Windows 7 FUD, but it is actually countering it on the official Windows Blog.

We grabbed the next 10 unique samples that arrived in the SophosLabs feed to see how well the newer, more secure version of Windows and UAC held up. Unfortunately, despite Microsoft's claims, Windows 7 disappointed just like earlier versions of Windows. The good news is that, of the freshest 10 samples that arrived, 2 would not operate correctly under Windows 7.

Sophos didn't do anything wrong, per se, but that headline did quite a lot of damage. Microsoft never claimed Windows 7 was the solution to security problems, and yet there was damage control that had to be done. The Windows Security Blog countered the blog post with one titled Windows 7 Vulnerability Claims and laid out everything related to Windows 7 and security. Here's the conclusion, but we would encourage reading the whole post:

So while I'm not a fan of companies sensationalizing findings about Windows 7 in order to sell more of their own software, I nevertheless agree with them that you still need to run anti-virus software on Windows 7. This is why we've made our Microsoft Security Essentials offering available for free to customers. But it's also equally important to keep all of your software up to date through automatic updates, such as through the Windows Update service. By configuring your computers to download and install updates automatically you will help ensure that you have the highest level of protection against malware and other vulnerabilities.

The second FUD story came earlier this week, courtesy of an interview by PCR titled Microsoft's new vision. The quote that people couldn't quite wrap their heads around came from Microsoft's partner group manager, Simon Aldous: "What we've tried to do with Windows 7 - whether it's traditional format or in a touch format—is create a Mac look and feel in terms of graphics. We've significantly improved the graphical user interface, but it's built on that very stable core Vista technology, which is far more stable than the current Mac platform, for instance."

Microsoft didn't let this one fly for long. The Windows 7 Blog reacted with a post titled How we really designed the look and feel of Windows 7 and again did some cleanup work: "An inaccurate quote has been floating around the Internet today about the design origins of Windows 7 and whether its look and feel was “borrowed” from Mac OS X. Unfortunately this came from a Microsoft employee who was not involved in any aspect of designing Windows 7. I hate to say this about one of our own, but his comments were inaccurate and uninformed. If you’re interested in learning more about the design of Windows 7, I suggest reading this AP story with Julie Larson-Green as well as these WSJ (membership required) and Fast Company articles. And here is one of many blog posts on the E7 blog discussing the design process of Windows 7."

At the time of writing, the Windows Blog has 15 individual blogs covering a different aspect of the operating system lineup; the Windows team continues to slowly embrace the concept of blogging, and with Windows 7 it is taking the blogosphere even more seriously than it has with previous Windows releases. It's really great to be able to quickly get the official stance from Microsoft on controversial Windows topics. That's not something you can get from a press release that gets put together over a length of a few days or even weeks.